From John Cook's review in the current
Bookforum of books on Wikileaks -
Assange's primary contribution to what he has repeatedly described as the largest leak of classified information in history consisted, essentially, of checking his e-mail. Aside from that, judging from Domscheit-Berg's account, WikiLeaks staffers spent most of their time Googling the organization's name and attending conferences.
That's not to diminish the genius of the idea Assange had in WikiLeaks, which was essentially to cut reporters and editors out of the process of disseminating sensitive information. It's simply to say that the story of how he did it is exceedingly dull, and that much of the cloak-and-dagger mythology that has developed around him since WikiLeaks began handing over hundreds of thousands of classified Defense and State Department documents to various newspapers last year is just that — mythology.
Cook goes on to describe the relationship between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who -
joined WikiLeaks as a volunteer in 2007. He was swiftly promoted to being the group's chief spokesman, acting essentially as Assange's deputy. He begins the story as one of Assange's many wide-eyed congregants and ends it as a bitter and betrayed renegade. Their relationship was complicated and characterized primarily by Domscheit-Berg's keen hunger for affirmation from Assange and Assange's idle contempt for Domscheit-Berg. In high school terms, Assange is the cool and self-confident kid for whom everything comes easy; Domscheit-Berg is the clueless mule Assange keeps around to buy cigarettes. The intensity of Domscheit-Berg's desire for validation from his antihero borders on the pathetic. At the book's opening, he writes, "Sometimes I hate him so much that I'm afraid I'd resort to physical violence if our paths ever cross again." Yet when Domscheit-Berg became engaged to be married in March 2010, long after his relationship with Assange had deteriorated and Assange had started to behave cruelly toward him, "Julian was the first person I told ... there was nothing I wanted more than to have Julian there." After their final parting, Domscheit-Berg carried his laptop with him everywhere, including the bathroom, with the hope that Assange would bury the hatchet via a chat program.
Thumbs down for St Julian the Whitehaired Martyr -
The Assange who emerges through these chats is autocratic, vain, pedantic, self-aggrandizing, and utterly without self-awareness. "Under no circumstances was anyone permitted to criticize his Tweets", Domscheit-Berg writes — and the comic disproportion of that edict tells you all you really need to know. At various points, Assange says things like "I'm off to end a war", "Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis," and "I will destroy you." When two Swedish women filed sexual-assault charges against Assange — an accusation that landed him in a British prison; he is, at the time of this writing, appealing an order that he be extradited to Sweden to answer the complaint — Assange's reaction was to berate his staff for failing to organize rallies supporting him, raise money for his legal defense, and procure "false papers" so that he could travel without facing the charges.
Very Secret Squirrel or Inspector Gadget.
Assange certainly didn't view himself as a man who rented servers. He insisted on ludicrous security arrangements and told unconfirmed tales of assassination attempts, placing himself at the center of vast conspiracies even before he became a household name. And after he received a collection of intelligence documents from Afghanistan, incident reports from Iraq, and State Department cables from around the world—almost certainly from Private Bradley Manning, a dissident army intelligence analyst who now sits in a military brig — the spy games intensified. He began traveling with bodyguards, Domscheit-Berg writes. According to Leigh and Harding, he dressed up as an old lady in November 2010 during a drive from London to Ellingham, England, to avoid unspecified bogeymen.
Obtaining those documents seemed to change Assange — in much the same way that Gollum became a different being entirely when he happened on the ring. As all these books show, it's not that Assange was covetous — he was in fact loose with the cables, doling them out to various hangers-on and even giving the whole database to one Icelandic volunteer who then leaked it to another reporter. But the power they bestowed was not lost on him. One of the grand ironies of Assange's story is that WikiLeaks' success transformed the group into precisely the thing it was designed to render obsolete — a journalistic institution with its own agenda. ...
For decades, secrets have been trafficked through a professional class of journalists and newspapers with their own interests, liabilities, social networks, and standards of official conduct. ... Enter WikiLeaks, which performed a technological end run around the sclerotic, compromised journalist class. Assange's digital machine was nearly automatic. Anonymous leakers uploaded their wares, and if WikiLeaks volunteers could verify the material, it would be published in the order in which it was received. If successful, such a system could rob the journalistic establishment of its power as gatekeeper between the murky netherworld of secrets and rumors and the light of day.
But instead of undermining that power, Assange sought to commandeer it. Both The Guardian's WikiLeaks and the Times' Open Secrets reveal Assange's tortured relationship with the newspapers to be more about control and ego than information. Worried that the disclosures of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and State Department documents wouldn't be high-profile enough if WikiLeaks staffers simply dumped them onto the Web, Assange agreed to offer The Guardian, the Times, and Der Speigel (and later El País and Le Monde) exclusive access to the documents ahead of publication. But with each release (the consortium published the Afghanistan documents in July and the Iraq ones in October, then began releasing the cables in November), relations became more frayed. Assange began making side deals, promising access to the State Department cables to television news outlets without consulting the other partners. At the same time, he held out on handing over the cables to the eager Guardian reporters he'd promised them to; Leigh and Harding write that he "talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to 'discipline' the mainstream media."
The "the sclerotic, compromised journalist class" hasn't come to heel.
